On the heels of this week’s unprecedented $13 billion mortgage settlement by JP Morgan Chase for its bad lending practices, a Spain-based speech analytics firm is targeting the financial services market with software tools to monitor and manage financial traders’ behaviors. Fonetic, a 10-year old private company, provides a cross-channel technology to analyze and decode trader interactions via speech analytics for phone, email and chat communications, and social media monitoring.

With a focus on insurance, telecommunications, government and finance, Fonetic has found particular traction in offering solutions for enterprises looking to comply with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. This landmark piece of legislation was signed into law by President Obama in July 2010 as a response to the financial crisis of the “Great Recession” and serves as a regulatory tool to keep banks and financial services firms in check.

According to Simon Richards, global sales and marketing director with Fonetic, Dodd-Frank has had worldwide repercussions as any global financial services firm that carries out trades with U.S. banks must comply.

Fonetic’s technology takes unstructured data from voice, email and chat interactions to create a searchable database to analyze communications based on content, reconstruct trades, or identify risk patterns. The company names BBVA as a signature customer, who has been using the technology since 2009. Richards says Fonetic has only publicly been promoting their software as Dodd-Frank record-keeping solution since April of this year.

The company’s uses Nuance speech processing technology and Genesys SpeechMiner platform for call processing. With connectors into all sources of voice and text traffic into a bank infrastructure, the technology can handle up to 79 languages, but primarily caters to English, French, and Spanish.

Last week, Fonetics added voice biometrics as a way for banks to verify a caller’s identity, track their interactions, and authenticate transactions by traders. The company names Agnitio as the technology provider and offers voice biometrics as an additional feature for banks requesting authentication capabilities.

“For banks looking to implement a Dodd-Frank trading record keeping solution before the April 2014 deadline, Fonetic’s solution is still the only fully-functioning and proven platform available on the market, and we continue to drive industry innovation by being the first to integrate biometric voice analysis” said Juan Manuel Soto in a statement from last week.

The company is planning to open a U.S. office in New York City in the first quarter of next year, with designs on opening future offices in London and Singapore.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Authentication, Articles

Tags: speech processing, speech analytics, Voice biometrics